creative writing on environmental justice
(Selected from the field guide left on your nightstand)
Common Raven:
Your favorite bird. There was a big one that lived in the hospital courtyard and, on your good days, I’d take you out to see it.
Arthur Corey owns a small house in Port Charlotte, Florida. It’s bright lemon yellow, with a lawn he’s trying to kill, and a carport with no car, where a glass table gathers bong ash in the shade of seagrapes.
Coccoloba uvifera is more closely related to grapes than he is, but less than oak trees are. It has thick, wide leaves and round, edible, purple fruit that grow . . .
1.
The year 2067 is an endless Water War. I am standing in front of what used to be a Pizza Pizza on the corner of Queen and Bathurst, fighting alongside my family, because of course my family is there. I am toothless and my partner’s glasses are so scratched they’re almost useless and our son has made us armour from old license plates. I am defending my ancient sloshing . . .
I moved to Florida from Wisconsin when I was ten, but Curtis “Wild Hair” Kensington had been born there. I remember him running across the vacant lots, shirtless with his chaotic hair flying, his skin red from the sun in those pre-sunscreen days. His feet were so tough from going barefoot that the sandspurs that pained the rest of us bounced from the callused soles . . .
Paved roadways run across my body like a complex system of exposed veins and arteries. Over the years, they’ve carried you from one milestone in life to the next.
By bus or by car.
On bike or on foot.
But our relationship, as it currently stands, is unsustainable. None of this will last forever.
1994: The first time you ever saw snow. Microscopic flakes fell from . . .
My granddaughter Nisha bounces on the tips of her toes, with flutter kicks in between, a hummingbird barely touching the sidewalk. I adjust the rebreather plugged into my nostrils and push myself forward. Keeping up with her has gotten harder, not just because of my age. Walking is different now. The air resists my habitual gait. Little hops lift me into the thickened . . .
Later I am a woven mat, to clean oil spills in the Indian Ocean. Before I was a forbidden braid, made with trembling hands and YouTube videos in a locked and midnight bathroom. But now I am loose and free, lax between the stylist’s comb and humming shears, as Lian meets their own eyes in the wall-length mirror.
“Just the left side,” they say.
The stylist winks. “I hear . . .
We are not doing anything about it because we have to help our parents pay their mortgage. We are not doing anything about it because the children want dogs to play with. We are not doing anything about it because I cannot stop thinking about a girl I sat and watched at a coffee shop six subway stops away. We are not doing anything because who believes that stuff anyway? . . .
Along the shoreline, the mineral trees have risen from the sea like jeweled hands reaching for the sky. Further out, long branches of coral have joined above the waves, spiraling together into bright red and blue and green—fingers crossed for some imagined future.
Today is the day the world will come. From the window, she can see the media unloading cameras, . . .
Cheena’s so quiet, she never talks anymore after her shifts. She just comes home and puts her clothes away. Drapes herself in a white sheet, tied like a toga, doesn’t worry about anything hanging out or staying in. It’s the shape the toga makes against her thighs that matters to her. The strong edges and the void covered by cloth. I wonder if it’s true what they say, . . .